Avex launches $5M renovation at Camarillo Airport

Avex has begun a $5 million renovation at Camarillo Airport to modernize facilities, expand maintenance and hangar capacity, and elevate the customer experience. The project will upgrade infrastructure, add amenities, and streamline operations for pilots and aircraft owners, supporting training, safety, and faster turnaround times. Avex says the investment signals a long-term commitment to Ventura County and the aviation community, creating room for growth while positioning the company to meet rising demand for aircraft services.

Avex, part of The Blackhawk Group, is pouring $5 million into a sweeping overhaul of its Performance Center at Camarillo Airport (KCMA) on California’s coast. The plan isn’t just a paint job or a few new chairs, it’s a ground-up rethink of how pilots, owners, technicians, and guests move through the space and use its services, with a clear emphasis on the Daher TBM community that Avex has long supported.

The centerpiece of the effort is a dramatic improvement in the spaces where people actually spend time. Customers will step into a lounge that feels more like a high-end clubhouse than a waiting area, with refreshed interiors, modern finishes, and thoughtful comforts designed to smooth the in-between moments of aviation, preflight briefings, quick meetings, and the inevitable stretches of downtime that come with flying. Quiet, private work areas will let owners and crews catch up on emails or take a call without the chatter of the main room, and those rooms will be as functional as they are attractive, with the connectivity and tools travelers expect.

Pilots get their own leap forward. The new pilot lounge will be engineered for working aviators: restful seating, practical amenities, and crucially, direct access to the ramp. That means less time hiking back and forth across the facility and more time focused on the mission. Adjacent conference and flight-planning rooms bring everything into one orbit, chart study, weather checks, crew coordination, and those last-minute flight plan tweaks that always seem to crop up at the eleventh hour.

Avex also wants to make the path from “What if?” to “Let’s install it” much shorter. A dedicated design center will give owners a hands-on way to explore custom upgrades and avionics packages. Instead of paging through spec sheets and trying to imagine the result, clients will be able to visualize configurations, materials, and layouts before a single screw is turned. It’s the kind of immersive, choice-driven experience that has become standard in automotive and yachting and it’s long overdue in general aviation. By bringing that capability into the Performance Center, Avex streamlines decisions and helps ensure the finished aircraft matches an owner’s taste, mission profile, and budget.

Another key element is a new community hub. More than a lounge, this space is meant to be a gathering point, a place where TBM owners meet for seminars, maintenance briefings, safety stand-downs, and the kind of casual hangar-talk that spreads best practices faster than any manual. Aviation is a relationship business, and Avex is betting that a welcoming, flexible venue will strengthen ties across the TBM ecosystem: pilots comparing SOPs, owners trading tips on avionics integration, instructors coordinating training blocks, and technicians sharing lessons learned from the field.

The remodel aligns with Avex’s larger strategy of elevating TBM support on the West Coast. The company has consistently invested in performance and sustainment, most recently with certification of the XP66D Engine+ upgrade for the TBM 700 series and this facility project extends that mindset into the customer experience. In short, the hardware keeps getting better, and Avex wants the ground game to match: faster turnarounds, smarter workflows, clearer communication, and a setting that takes the stress out of maintenance and modification events.

Blackhawk Group CEO Chad Cundiff has framed the project as a vote of confidence in both the location and the aircraft. Camarillo is an ideal base for the TBM fleet, close to Los Angeles, with favorable weather and quick access to the Pacific coast routes and inland corridors and the TBM platform is renowned for its blend of speed, efficiency, and range. Upgrading the Performance Center at KCMA strengthens both advantages. From Cundiff’s perspective, the facility should reflect the aircraft it serves: modern, capable, and relentlessly focused on performance. That means better amenities, more intuitive spaces, and a service experience that feels as polished as the turbine humming on the ramp.

For TBM owners and operators, the message is simple: Avex is in this for the long run. A multi-million-dollar buildout doesn’t happen for a short-term bump; it’s a foundation for the next decade of growth. Longtime customers can expect continuity, familiar faces, specialist know-how, wrapped in a better environment. Newcomers to the TBM world will find a home base that’s set up to guide them through the learning curve: from initial upgrades and avionics choices to training rhythms, maintenance planning, and mission optimization.

The payoff for the broader aviation community could be significant as well. Facilities like this tend to raise the bar for everyone: when one shop introduces a richer design consult, a smarter pilot workspace, or a more congenial hangout for owner-pilot groups, others follow suit. That competition, friendly or otherwise, ultimately benefits the people who fly and maintain these aircraft. It also helps recruit the next generation. Bring a prospective pilot into a bright, bustling, thoughtfully designed center and they start to see aviation not as a maze of forms and fluorescent lighting, but as a modern, welcoming craft.

In the end, Avex’s remodel is about aligning the ground experience with the promise of the airplane. The TBM line is celebrated for transforming long trips into efficient, single-pilot missions; the Performance Center aims to transform service stops into something equally streamlined and satisfying. If Avex delivers on that vision, Camarillo’s upgraded hub won’t just be a nice place to wait, it will be an essential part of how the TBM community flies, plans, learns, and grows in Southern California and beyond.

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Source: ainonline‍